How to Choose a 1/4" Cable

If you’re like most guitarists and bassists,
you probably started hoarding guitar
cables pretty early on in your playing career.
For decades now—probably since the dawn
of electric guitar—many a basement jam
has ended in cable-spaghetti chaos. Back in
the day, you’d get home from the jam and
later realize that the 10-foot Switchcraft
you’d bought last month had somehow
shape-shifted into an old Kordex Audible
Purity, or vice versa. Like guitar picks,
cables tended to change hands pretty easily
because none of us really gave any consideration
to how they sounded—all that mattered
was that they worked. And the more
you had, the better.

Back in the ’80s, we carried around
knapsacks full of them—thick ones, thin
ones, molded ones, coiled ones, long ones,
short ones, and even the cheap Radio Shack
knockoffs that at times seemed like they
might have been more useful as shoelaces.
Every once in a while, someone would
splurge for a high-end professional model
and prattle on for hours about how much
cooler and deeper it made everything sound.
The poor sap would bring it to rehearsal,
plug in his Strat, crank it up and shout,
“Hear that?” We’d just look at each other
and shrug, knowing that eventually, that
very same cable would make the knapsack
rounds, too.

Slowly but surely though, over the last
couple of decades, these attitudes have
changed. Some attribute it to the advent
of digital recording: As software grew more
adept at delivering pristine, high-resolution
audio, weak links in the signal chain
began to stand out, creating a demand for
instrument cables that were better at suppressing
triboelectric noise (aka “handling
noise”—clicks and pops, mostly) but that
also didn’t EQ the sound of the guitar (a
phenomenon that basically comes down to
a cable’s capacitance, which we’ll get into
in a minute). Meanwhile, as competition
among cable manufacturers picked up and
new companies joined the fray, design engineers
started to dig more into research and
analysis, all in a concerted effort to “build a
better cable.”

As Jim D’Addario recalls, after D’Addario
& Co. acquired the Planet Waves line in
1998, the focus was on problem solving—specifically, signal loss and degradation,
handling noise, and connection failures.
“We started measuring everything, because
we wanted to find out what was there,” he
says. “And we really didn’t play into EQ-ing
the tone of your guitar before it hits your
first pedal or your amplifier. If you’ve got
great-sounding strings with a good pickup
and a good cable, the signal should be pure
and not doctored-up by pieces of equipment
in the chain. When you get to your effects
and your amplifier, that’s where you tailor
your sound.”

These days, it no longer makes sense to
consider your guitar cables as mere accessories.
Materials, manufacturing processes, and
design specs have evolved to such a degree
that many seasoned axe-slingers swear they
can hear—or at the very least detect—noticeable
differences in signal response, transient
harmonics, and dynamic range. Elite players
have always endorsed specific brands because
they heard something that appealed to them,
but now more than ever, companies rely on
constant feedback from their endorsees—and
of course, their regular customers—in an
effort to stand out in an increasingly competitive
market.

For bassists and guitarists, it’s a great
time to shop and experiment. The big
names like Whirlwind, Planet Waves,
George L’s, Hosa Technology (and its subsidiary,
Zaolla Silverline), Mogami, and
more have rolled out new cable lines or
introduced significant upgrades in the past
year, while young companies and recent
mergers like Lava Cable, RapcoHorizon,
and the Austin-based upstart Asterope
continue to keep the big boys on their toes.
We’d need a book-length study to get into
an exhaustive roundup of what’s out there,
but there are some key characteristics to
look and listen for when choosing a solid
and dependable cable in today’s market.

The Capacitance Wars and
the “Sweet Spot”
Capacitance, measured in picofarads (pF),
began emerging as a buzzword in the late
’90s, and rightly so. It’s probably the single
most influential property that affects the
sound of a cable. Bill Lawrence—who
began designing pickups and guitars
for the likes of Fender, Gibson, Peavey,
and others in the 1950s, and who pioneered
solderless cables—explains why.
“The higher the capacitance of a cable,
the less highs reach the amplifier. High-capacitance
cables shift the resonance
towards the lower frequencies, which
dramatically alters tone. For example, Jimi
Hendrix used a coiled cord with 3,000
pF [of capacitance]. This was the secret of
Jimi’s tone: Shifting the resonance frequency
below 2,000 Hz on his Strats has a similar
effect to a midrange boost. When he
recorded and needed a typical Strat sound
for some tracks, Jimi switched to a short,
low-capacitance cable.” (This also brings up
a valuable corollary: The longer the cable,
the greater the capacitance—which is why
shorter cables always sound brighter.)

Among most manufacturers today, the
consensus “sweet spot” for capacitance is
between 20 and 30 pF per foot—a fraction
of what Hendrix and his contemporaries
had to wrangle. The reasoning comes
from years of measurement, customer
feedback, and plain old trial-and-error. “As
I’ve designed my own cables, I’ve found
that it’s really a balancing act,” says Lava
Cable founder and CEO Mark Stoddard.
“If you think of your guitar cable as a
pipe—the lower the capacitance, the bigger
the pipe—two things happen if you go
too low: Your highs are out there longer,
so the note won’t drop off in time and the
guitar will sound shrill to most people.
The other risk—and I learned this the hard
way—is that the cable tends to be more
microphonic. That’s literally because you
can hear more.”

George Lewis, who founded George
L’s in the ’70s and is widely credited with
bringing the first low-cap, high-end guitar
cables to market, apparently favored the
lower (and thus brighter-sounding) end
of the sweet spot. The company’s most
prominent endorsee is Eric Johnson,
whose crystalline clean tone seems naturally
geared for the upper-mid accent that’s
a signature of, for example, the George
L’s .225 line of cable—a slightly heftier
cable, in terms of weight and thickness,
than the .155, which is sold as part of the
company’s custom effects kit. (With solderless
connections growing in popularity,
it’s easier than ever for players to cut and
assemble their own patch cables.) George
L’s also sells bulk cable by the foot—another innovation that more companies
are adopting.

Hosa Technology’s Elite Series model
hovers around 21 pF, which theoretically
places it in the sonic ballpark of George L’s.
The same holds true for Mogami’s Platinum
Series, but as Mogami cable is sometimes
considered the Cadillac (or perhaps more
aptly, the Lexus LFA) of premium guitar
cables, similarities start to diverge with the
pF rating. Hosa’s Elite can claim equal
reductions in handling noise and even
similar connectors made by Neutrik, but
Mogami’s large-diameter cable is made
with Neutrik’s Silent Plug, which cuts
the signal out completely when changing
instruments. There’s a clear aura of luxury
to any Mogami product. However, at
twice the price of some of its competitors,
whether the high-end engineering and
add-ons translate to noticeable differences
in sound (more on this below) is in the
ear of the beholder.

Further up the capacitance ladder,
the affordable Planet Waves American
Stage cable targets a very specific 28 pF
range. As a matter of philosophy, Jim
D’Addario doesn’t see the need to go
overboard with vastly different sonic
flavors. “If you look back at the history
of some of our competitors, they might
have had a ‘lead guitar’ model and a ‘jazz’
model and whatever else, and essentially
all they did was doctor the EQ by building
different levels of capacitance into
the cable and attenuating the highs. Do
you really need to buy two $60 cables
with different sounds when you can just
change the tone on your amp? That’s
something we wanted to address right from
the beginning.”

Over at Lava Cable, Stoddard agrees in
principle with this approach, at least as far
as capacitance is concerned. To that end,
Lava Ultramafic premium cable is rated at
25 pF and made with a silver-plated copper
conductor at a slightly larger-than-normal
18 gauge, which Stoddard discovered gives
the cable a “punchier” sound. But he’s also
keenly aware that customer tastes can be
wide-ranging and eclectic, and he tries to
accommodate them whenever feasible.

“One guy may not like what another guy
thinks is the bomb,” he explains, “but you
still can recommend things. For example,
coils are great for Fender amps, because
Fenders are bright, and a 20-foot coil is
equivalent to about a 30-foot cable in terms
of accumulated capacitance, which makes
the amp sound a little darker and more
musical. Greg Koch has been using our
coils for quite some time, and [Nashville
whiz kid] Daniel Donato loves them.”

Along those lines, RapcoHorizon G5S
Professional cable is an affordable 18-gauge
model rated at 45 pF, so it falls into the
darker end of the sonic spectrum. That said,
the prevailing school of thought about higher-
capacitance cables, as Bill Lawrence notes
in his Hendrix example, is that they’re better
suited for the rigors of live performance.
This is especially true when considering the
usual noisy ambience of a crowded venue,
where the sonic nuances of low-capacitance
premium cables tends to get lost.

In fact, this is exactly what Whirlwind’s
Al Keltz told PG in 2008, but not because
he believed such low-cap cables necessarily
merited their premium price. “I agree
that cables can and do have some effect
on frequency response,” he said, partly in
defense of the company’s stalwart Leader
series, which to this day is a staple of rugged
dependability on the road, “but unless
the cable capacitance is extremely high, the
effect will be subtle. These differences also
become much less noticeable when you fire
up the whole band and all sorts of sounds
start interacting with each other onstage due
to room resonances and comb filtering.”

This throws open the floor to all sorts
of opinions about whether incremental
changes in capacitance really can be
heard—a discussion that gets even more
potentially delicious when a new company
like Asterope steps to the fore with what it
maintains is a disruptive technology. “We
want to create emotional experiences for
artists and listeners,” says president and
CEO Dariush Rad, “and help them deliver
signals that are providing obvious and clear
advances in harmonics and sonic characteristics—bandwidth, transient response,
spectral balance—all these things that are
very real and at the critical heart of making
music. We know there are skeptics, but you
can hear it and literally feel it with this technology.
That’s what I want to share with
every player I know.”

A respected record producer and engineer
himself, Rad waxes almost poetic in
his commitment to Asterope’s premium
Pro Artist line, for example. Thus far, the
company has kept its design specs very close
to the vest, but the glowing praise from
guitarists who endorse the cable—including
David Grissom, Lance Keltner, and
Kenny Vaughan (each a musician’s musician
among Austin and Nashville cognoscenti)—suggests perhaps Asterope really is on to
something different.

Materially Speaking
Once you get past capacitance, opinions
begin to deviate wildly about other aspects
of a cable’s design that might affect a guitar’s
signal characteristics. Some insist the
pure conductivity of the metals used to
make the 1/4" connectors plays a role in the
sound. Others get into a soldered vs. solderless
standoff, where a cold weld or a gas-tight
crimp might be the only acceptable
alternative to a good old-fashioned solder.
And still others would rather hang from a
ledge by their fingernails than admit that a
standard cable sounds the same no matter
which end you plug into the guitar.

One thing we can be sure about:
Whether a cable is made with oxygen-free
copper (OFC) or electrolytic-tough-pitch
(ETP) “common” copper, it won’t help
you sound like Eddie Van Halen. But a
case can be made for high-quality materials
having some influence on the sound, however
minute, especially when considering
conductivity.

“Whenever you increase the conductivity
of the cable and lower its resistance, it
typically sounds a little bit better,” Lava’s
Stoddard asserts. “It’s not a whole lot, but
it’s there.” He points to his Ultramafic
cable, which is made with custom-shopped
plugs from G&H (one of the main
suppliers of parts, along with Neutrik,
to American cable manufacturers). “The
plugs have a silver core,” he explains, “so
we literally replace about four inches of
brass with silver, which is higher in conductivity
and lower in resistance.”

Hosa Technology vouches for its premium
Zaolla Silverline cables with a
similar assertion, albeit with more detail.
“While it is true that silver is superior to
copper as a pure conductor of electricity,
this is not to say that silver alone is
suitable for every application. If it was
that easy, we could simply replace copper
with silver and be done with it! Low-level
analog audio signals benefit from
the MF [midrange frequency] boost, or
‘warmth,’ associated with copper. Thus,
all Zaolla Silverline instrument cables
feature a solid-silver center conductor
and an enamel-coated, stranded-copper
ancillary conductor in a unique hybrid
configuration for the best of both
worlds.” To some players, that complex
explanation might sound a bit hard to
prove, but then again that’s not exactly
a new situation in guitardom. As with
everything else in “the relentless pursuit
of tone,” the only way to know for certain
whether certain bits of minutia will
make a difference in your sound is to
test-drive a product yourself.

Of course, let’s not forget that quality
parts and craftsmanship should also
extend the life of the cable—and address
long-standing design flaws whenever
possible. Jim D’Addario points to one
small innovation with the American
Stage cable that was engineered as a
solution to the wide variation in instrument
jacks that often results in loose
connections. “The tip of the plug is called
a GeoTip, because the geometry of it is
completely different,” he says. Basically,
thanks to a slightly flattened bulb and an
elongated shield, the newly designed tip
enables a more secure connection with
the positive flange of just about any jack,
old or new. “It’s the kind of detail that
looks like nothing, but we put hundreds
of hours into designing and testing that
sucker so we can cover enough of all the
variations, and come up with a better connection
for everybody. It’s very similar to
putting a seat belt on [laughs]. When you
here that clunk, it just goes in and you
know it’s gonna stay there.”

In the End, Trust Your Ears
With so many choices at your disposal, it’s
easy to get overwhelmed when looking for
1/4" instrument and patch cables. But the
main thing to keep in mind is that a cable is
an integral part of your signal path, and that—just with everything else in the chain from
your instrument to your amp—you should
follow what you hear. No matter what your
philosophy about cables—if you like them flat
and uncolored, or with enough accumulated
capacitance to coil a python—just keep your
ears open, and you’ll find one that fits your
sound, your playing style, and your budget.
“To strip it down to the basics, signal
matters,” Rad says. “You’re spending a
lifetime honing your craft, and you’re
spending thousands of dollars on your rig,
so don’t underestimate how critical your
signal path is. We should be cradling that
like a baby, because that’s where all the
data is, y’know?”

And once you’ve got a handle on the
data, feel free to take that baby out for a
stroll. “Guitar players have freaky ears,”
Stoddard quips. “We’re constantly tweaking
sound, whether it’s a pedal or an amp or a
guitar, and I think most of us have a sound
in our head that we’re after. Everyone’s got
something that they like, and your cable
is an integral part of that. There are tone
freaks out there who will take a brand new
cable, no matter what kind it is, and they’ll
plug it in back and forth, in two different
directions over and over again, until they
find the direction they think sounds best,
and then they’ll mark it!

“What I still believe to this day, though,
is if you find the cable you really like and
that works in your rig, it opens up more
tonal range in your amp and gives you
more depth to work with. That’s the key
lesson I’ve learned. If you do your research
and play with a few cables and find that
one you like, you literally have more room.
I’m not a shredder, but I’m a digger, and if
I’m digging in, I want to feel that note. I
want to hear it freakin’ scream! A good cable
can make a difference. It can help that note
sustain better, and that’s not snake oil.”

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